Trauma surgeon testifies in Bucktown bat-beating case

The shocking 2010 beating of Irish exchange student Natasha McShane and her American friend Stacy Jurich in Bucktown, a trendy, generally safe Chicago neighborhood, became an international symbol of the city's violence.

Steve SchmadekeTribune reporter

A trauma surgeon who treated an exchange student from Northern Ireland who was brutally beaten with a baseball bat during a Bucktown mugging testified that the student was “making sounds but not comprehensible words.”

Dr. Marius Katilius said Natasha McShane was only opening her eyes in response to pain after arriving at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center.

McShane suffered skull fractures above her right ear and bleeding on and around her brain, according to the testimony at the trial of Heriberto Viramontes, who is charged with attempted murder and armed robbery.

Katilius said McShane was intubated because of his concern that she could lose her ability to breathe on her own.

Physicians also made an unusual discovery when McShane’s head was imaged – a stone in the back of her throat.

No explanation was provided for the stone, but on Wednesday Jurich testified that she saw McShane “lifelessly” collapse face first onto the pavement after being struck in the head with the baseball bat.

According to testimony on Wednesday from McShane’s mother, Sheila, her once vibrant and gifted daughter has been left so severely injured from the 2010 attack that she can no longer talk and struggles with simple tasks like drinking from a cup.